Episode 260: The Scream That Never Found a Voice (Murakami's "Sleep")

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. Sorry?

[00:00:18] What was that again? I'm a god. You're a god. I'm a god. I'm not THE god. I don't think. The Greatest Boss has spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! I'm a very good man. Good.

[00:00:30] They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Well, I hope you enjoyed the podcast. I'm David Pizarro, and I'll see you next time.

[00:00:37] Bye for now. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:18] Dave, a woman had a full body orgasm during a performance of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony by the LA Philharmonic. Dave, this is unbelievable. Did you know women could have orgasms? That's an urban myth. That's what society tries to tell you. Yeah, I think yeah. Woke propaganda.

[00:01:42] No woman I've ever been with, at least. It's pretty amazing, the coverage. I just read a little bit of the coverage and people were like, nobody was shaming the woman. They were like, oh, and the orchestra kept playing and good for her.

[00:01:59] But I'm like, good for her unless her boyfriend was trying to finger her during that thing. I don't think that's what it was. You can tell if the people behind them and next to them were feeling it. Right. Although I don't know.

[00:02:18] Maybe she had one of those things that's remote controlled. She was wearing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. But like, Occam's Razor, it's the five. Tchaikovsky's Fifth. Who among us won't splooge at the five? Do you think like to Very Bad Wizards episode five? Yeah.

[00:02:44] Well, I love the ambulators. Did you listen to the four? People ask us all the time, do we have a central place where we list all the media that we've discussed and the answer is no. So if anybody ever wants to build that out. Yeah.

[00:02:59] I don't know if this is someone did a letterbox of the movies and I don't know if that's still going. I don't know either, but it would be cool to have movies, short stories and books. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:03:11] Among the episodes that would be listed there would be this episode because in the second segment we will be diving for the first time into the work of Haruki Murakami. In particular, this episode, his short story Sleep, which is a banger. It is very good.

[00:03:30] It is a banger. That's a good way to describe it. People on Reddit always say that I call everything a masterpiece and I think everything is great. And it's like, well, we choose things because they're really good. Totally.

[00:03:43] And we both spent quite a bit of time trying to find an appropriate story. So it's not like we're just, it's not like we're spinning the wheel and whatever it lands on we call a masterpiece.

[00:03:53] But before we get to Murakami, we thought we'd talk a little bit about this came from a tweet. It was actually like months ago that I had put in the Slack. And not only is the tweet from months ago, it's referring to a paper that's from a couple

[00:04:08] years ago from 2018. But I thought it was like a pretty clever idea given that all anybody ever wants to talk about nowadays is AI and how it's changing. The only thing anybody wants to talk about. And yet here we are. But this is a little twist on it.

[00:04:24] So this is a tweet from Ethan Mollick who was describing this paper. The setup is basically this. You and an android are in front of a judge. The judge tells each of you to say one word.

[00:04:36] They will then kill whoever they think is the AI based on that. And so there's a paper from some researchers at MIT in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology where they call, they refer to this as the minimum Turing test.

[00:04:49] So one word is all you have to convince somebody that you're not an AI. What word would that be? There are some results, but I think we should probably give our answers first. Yeah. Yes. Why don't you go first?

[00:05:03] Because I realize I have thoughts about it, but I haven't fully settled on an actual word. It's going to be controversial. I have gun to my head. This is the only way I would do it. Gun to my head. Literally, I'm going to die.

[00:05:18] I would drop the N-bomb. I had that same thought. And the idea is simply that so many of these AIs that are out there have programmed explicitly into them not to use that word. Oh, right. Yeah.

[00:05:35] So I feel like if somebody says that word fully, then just probabilistically it's not going to be an AI because it's hard to get the AI to say it. I wonder if that's a fair thing to do, just assume that this AI has the constraints that

[00:05:54] the current chatbots or whatever have. Yeah. It's hurt. It actually matters a lot like what you assume. When we get to a modified version of this, I'll talk a little bit more about why it matters to me.

[00:06:10] Not only what the AI is, but who you're telling it to. So in this case, we're told it's a judge, which I take it as just some stand-in for reasonable person. And if it was someone I knew or whatever, that would make a huge difference.

[00:06:27] But I actually settled on, so I was thinking about the N-word. I wasn't thinking they had the constraint that the current ones have. But then I thought, well, these AIs typically get racist after, you know. For whatever reason, I don't think that's true of cunt.

[00:06:43] So I think I would say that. I don't see the AI saying that as just one word they could choose. And I feel like... Yeah. I think the theme is, yeah, that whatever AI, to the extent that it's trying to appear

[00:07:01] human probably wouldn't go to the worst words. And that's in fact, I feel like what these researchers found, which was that the most effective word, the word that most humans think would be most likely to tease you apart from an AI is poop. And I feel...

[00:07:26] Do they have constraints of what they could say? That's what I don't know, because I feel like the... Just decorum would make it so that they wouldn't print anything worse than poop. Or they wouldn't give any...

[00:07:42] They wouldn't give the words that we just gave as stimuli in the experiment. Oh yeah. So if you look at... Actually, they have this chart where you see all the different ones of what the... This is what AI thinks humans will pick.

[00:07:56] But compassion, soul, love, seems like those are the... Those two kinds of things. Whereas fuck and poop and shit and penis and vagina and cunt. There's mine. Oh, there it is. Bootylicious. That's so funny. Is further away. So I think we're on the right track with this. Right.

[00:08:21] What's interesting is that the way that these current AI work with the language learning models, they are... Now that this is out there, they're just going to incorporate it. But I did earlier today ask chat GPT for...

[00:08:41] And it said, the word I would use to convince someone that I'm a human being and not an artificial intelligence is empathy. As a language model, I have a vast repository of knowledge and can provide helpful responses,

[00:08:51] but I lack the ability to truly feel and understand emotions like humans do. By using the word empathy, I am trying to convey that I recognize the importance of human emotions and connections, which is something that an AI may not fully understand.

[00:09:02] This is what I don't get about what seems to be assumed here is that we're trying to convince you with this word that you have the quality of the word. I don't think that's what...

[00:09:15] If I was the judge, I wouldn't be looking and be like, oh, it must be human because it said empathy. Yeah, that's so stupid. Like convince you I'm a bird by saying the word fly? Yeah, right. It's like, I wouldn't think that.

[00:09:30] This is why I think like, you got to go more absurdist or like contrary. You have to do something like that doesn't make sense in some ways. Yeah, perverse in the way that Paul talks about the perverse stuff. You have to put reason aside.

[00:09:47] I actually asked as a follow up question, I asked Chad GPT, what if you could use a whole sentence? What would it be? And it said, if I could use a whole set, it always has to repeat your question like a very bad presenter.

[00:09:59] If I could use a whole sentence to convince someone that I am not an artificial intelligence, but a human being, I would say, quote, I am a human being with thoughts, feelings and experiences that shape who I am.

[00:10:09] And I value the uniqueness and complexity of the human experience. This is what everybody is shitting their pants about. It's just so I don't understand. No human would ever say that. To which I replied, but obviously you are an artificial intelligence and you provided

[00:10:25] this response, meaning that it cannot be very convincing of your humanity. And to which it issued an apology. You are correct. And that my thought responses are generated through algorithms and program patterns. While my previous response was an attempt to convey the idea of human experience and

[00:10:41] emotions, I cannot claim to have a genuine emotional experience. They always like kiss your ass, you know, to these things. I really feel like I'm in some sort of mass hysteria with this stuff because like anytime

[00:10:56] somebody actually does something like this, something a little weird, something a little like you'd have to use a little imagination. Like it can't do it at all. And it does something like just so boring and boilerplate.

[00:11:09] Yeah, the mistake is to think that we're going to get creativity out of this stuff. It's just built to not be very creative. To have to listen to people like who are terrified of this thing. So what did you think for sentences?

[00:11:23] I essentially thought with sentences it's the same thing. You have to go kind of absurdist. It doesn't have to be perverse, but it has to be something that would only be funny and make sense to a human.

[00:11:33] I actually thought like, you know, and here the assumption is that the AIs are these large language learning models. I would just say something very random, like, you know, something grammatically correct, but random, like the chicken leg slapped my face with green paint, you know, like something

[00:11:52] super, super random because there's like the way that they work, they just wouldn't pick like randomness. On Twitter we told people that we were going to talk about this and some people gave their versions of what they would say for sentences.

[00:12:09] I like this one from C Fart Fire Truck. Now I fuck this model and she just bleached her asshole and I get bleach on my t-shirt. I'm a feel like an asshole. Origin unknown. Do you know what that's quoting? It's some rap song. It's a Kanye.

[00:12:27] That's a Kanye song. That's funny. See that? Yeah. The cheese is old and moldy like that. That's like something kind of Lynchian, you know? It doesn't seem that difficult, but as soon as these models pick up that those are the

[00:12:44] kinds of things that people are saying, you know, it's going to be, we're ruining it. We're ruining it right now for people. Like a lot of people are going to die. Exactly. A lot of judges shooting random motherfuckers.

[00:12:58] Now I think this would be easy if you had sort of like what you were saying where it's like a friend that you know, but even if there were two strangers who share an occupation

[00:13:08] or expertise in something like there ought to be sentences that, that you too would know that nobody else would, you know, or that note that a machine wouldn't be able to generate because it doesn't know that thing about you. Yeah.

[00:13:21] So that would assume that they know at least something about you, the judge. The judge. Yeah. And that the, that the AI wouldn't have access to you. So like, let's say that you and the judge were both like freemasons, you know, whatever.

[00:13:34] And you just said one of their fucking secret passwords, you know, Fidelius. The scary thing is if the AI can like has access to all your Google and Facebook, Twitter, then it's just me. Yeah. Then it doesn't even matter who it shoots.

[00:13:53] That's just completely the distinction without a difference at that point. Don't at me about transporters, please. I was joking. I caught you in a contradiction. Where's your argument? Somebody used the Chomsky sentence colorless, like green ideas sleep furiously, which is

[00:14:19] the right idea except for that is a sentence that's out there. That person just ruined that idea. And Chomsky. And Chomsky. Asshole. By the way, the world's worst humblebrag you saying, oh, I put this into chat, GBT for GBT for. And I got the answer instantly. Yeah.

[00:14:37] I bit the bullet. I bit the bullet and paid for a month of the plus. So it's not it's sucker brag. It's I'm simping for chat. GBT. Yeah. I don't think I don't think I'm going to keep doing it.

[00:14:52] But I was very curious if four would would give any advantage in the four. Yeah. Wait till El Ocho. If you don't pay for it, what are you on? The one usually three. I think sometimes it it might sometimes give you four, but it doesn't explain.

[00:15:09] You don't have like the option. I sometimes feel like, oh, I got to check this out. I'll talk to it. And then I just immediately get annoyed by it just because of like it does all that other stuff. Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. That blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:15:24] You know, it's like, yeah, I wanted to be like the one that's telling me to leave my wife. You know, what you need is just a therapist. Yeah. It was not fun. It was boring. And she's a bitch. Like, that would be interesting.

[00:15:44] You want to bring out the animus, the shadow self of Bing. Where's Sydney when you need her? Sydney. That's what I love. I love that. All right. Well, anything else to say about this? Did we come up with a sentence?

[00:16:01] I mean, I came up with one just to illustrate the randomness, but I don't think you did. Yeah. Partially examined life sucks. No AI is going to say that. The judge has to be a very bad wizards listener, I'm assuming. It just like it doesn't. That's the thing.

[00:16:25] Right. Like they don't have to know anything about me or partially examined life. Why would an AI say partially examined life sucks? Right. Unless it was trained on the corpus of Taylor Sommers. Unless it heard this episode. The other day, somebody posted a...

[00:16:43] So you know how they have these AI voices now. Somebody posted a conversation that they had with Tupac and Biggie. And it was like with their uncanny voices. And I didn't listen to the whole thing, but they were talking about like, what's it like to be dead?

[00:17:00] And Biggie says, I don't even realize that I'm dead. Which was just like a very eerie moment. They did that apparently in the Anthony Bourdain documentary. They did a little AI of his voice for one thing, I think. That feels disrespectful. I don't know.

[00:17:17] Like they're going to just be able to go to town if they want our voices and all our inflections and all of that. We need a kill switch to destroy all of it. All of the episodes. Yeah, it's too late. All right.

[00:17:31] We'll be right back to talk about sleep. Today's episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Let me ask you a question. How much time do you spend on yourself in a given week? And how much time do you spend on other people?

[00:17:45] And how do you balance those two things? It's easy to get caught up in what everyone else needs. You know, that's like me. I just give, give, give, give. And everybody, my family, Pizarro, they just take, take, take.

[00:17:58] Some of the people in question might disagree with that characterization, but of course they would, right? Here's the thing though. When we spend all of our time giving, it can leave us feeling stretched way too thin and burnt out.

[00:18:10] Arguably, I think this is what in the Murakami story is happening in part with the protagonist. Therapy can give you the tools to find more balance in your life so you can keep supporting others without leaving yourself behind.

[00:18:25] Therapy has helped so many people that I know learn positive coping skills, how to set boundaries. Therapy empowers people to be the best version of themselves. So if you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online.

[00:18:42] It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Find more balance with BetterHelp.

[00:18:57] Visit betterhelp.com slash VBW to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash VBW. Thanks to BetterHelp as always for sponsoring this episode. Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:20:16] This is the time of the podcast where we like to take a moment to thank everybody for all of their support, for the ways that you reach out to us, communicate with us, participate in our community of listeners.

[00:20:30] If you would like to email us, you can reach us at verybadwizards at gmail.com or you can find us at Twitter and tweet to us at Tamler or at Pease or at Very Bad Wizards.

[00:20:41] If you want to take part in the lively, thriving Reddit community of listeners, you can find us at reddit.com slash r slash verybadwizards. You can also follow us on Instagram at verybadwizards.

[00:20:56] And if you would be willing to take a moment to rate us on Apple podcasts or even leave a nice review, we really appreciate that as well. We think that can help other people find the podcast.

[00:21:06] And finally, you can listen to us and subscribe and rate us on Spotify. If you want to support us in more tangible ways, you can always go to our Very Bad Wizards page and click on the support tab and there you'll find the various ways in which you

[00:21:20] could do that. You can buy some swag, you can give us a PayPal donation, a one-time or recurring donation, and you can become one of our patrons on patreon.com. We really appreciate that community there. And if you're a regular listener, we think you might like it.

[00:21:39] At different tiers, you get different things. At $1 and up, you get all of our episodes ad free and you get six volumes of beats that I've put together for our listeners. At $2 and up, you get access to all the bonus content.

[00:21:53] That's now years of extra discussions that we've had about various movies, TV shows, having different guests on. At $5 and up, you get to vote on an episode topic for an upcoming episode. We do that a couple of times a year.

[00:22:10] You also get access to our Five Part Brothers Karamazov series. You get my intro psych videos. You get a couple of videos from Tamler on the Plato's Symposium. And finally at $10 and up, you get everything I just mentioned, but you also get to ask us anything.

[00:22:26] You can submit a question to us and we will respond to it on video and release it. We also release it on audio for all of our $2 and up supporters. So thank you for all of the support that you guys have shown us.

[00:22:41] We can't say enough how much it means to us. There is literally no doubt in my mind that we would not be doing this 10 years in if it wasn't for our dear listeners. So thank you. Alright, let's talk about Murakami's great story, Sleep.

[00:22:57] This comes from his short story collection. The Elephant Vanishes. The Elephant Vanishes, which I bought. This story is accessible on the internet if you don't buy the Kindle, but it's like $10 or $11 and there's a bunch of great stories, including Barn Burning. Anyway, what a great story.

[00:23:20] I have never read, besides Barn Burning, it's the only other story that I've read. This is so good. So it's about a woman. It's told one of the very few things that Murakami has done that is where the protagonist

[00:23:32] is a woman and the first person narrator is a woman. She describes this new condition she finds herself in after a horrible dream, which I'm sure we'll talk about, where she just doesn't have to sleep but feels great.

[00:23:51] Seems almost like she's on good high quality speed or something. She has real concentration, real vitality. She can swim much more than she ever could swim before. She can read with unbroken concentration.

[00:24:07] It isn't insomnia and the way we know that is she gives a brief description of an insomnia period she had when she was a teenager, which is a really good description of insomnia, I thought. But this isn't that. I don't know what it is, but it's not that.

[00:24:28] It's kind of a riveting read the whole way through. It's like electric, but it's not like that much happens within the story. You hear about her life. You hear about the way she feels kind of disconnected with it and her husband and son.

[00:24:46] And then it all kind of leads up to a climactic scene in a parking lot that we have. I don't know what your thoughts are about that. I don't know what my thoughts are about that, but yeah, there's a lot to interpret.

[00:25:03] A lot to interpret in this, but like I can't stress enough just to get started in terms of what we thought about it. I was just kind of glued to the story the whole way through and in a way that I'm very

[00:25:14] rarely like that with stories, you know? Yeah. You told me when you picked it, you said it's pretty long. Yeah. So I didn't look at how long it was on my Kindle reader.

[00:25:28] And usually if a short story is long, like I'll start to feel it and I'll like scroll through to see how much I have left. I didn't do that once with this because it didn't feel long at all. Not at all. And maybe it's not that long.

[00:25:41] I mean, it's not. Yeah. But it's like 30 pages or something like that. But it's totally... I have a struggle with short stories sometimes, even Borges. Like just I have to get into the world and I have to like figure out what's going on and all that stuff is...

[00:25:57] And you have no connection to the characters yet. But with this one, for whatever reason, I was just on board for the start. Yeah. Learning about insomnia, I think something we've both suffered from helps. Totally. So what do you think this story is about?

[00:26:11] What do you think thematically it's doing? I know. You didn't even ask me if I liked it. What did you think of the story? Did you like it? Yeah. I loved it. I loved it. Like one of those...

[00:26:22] Do you ever get the feeling where you're like, how come nobody's told me to read this before? Yes. Yes. Totally. What's wrong with all of the people I know? Yeah. No. There's so much to unpack.

[00:26:33] This woman who is youngish, 30 year old woman with a husband and a son, and she's going through this and we hear everything from her perspective. And the description of her life, it moves throughout the story from one of like placid,

[00:26:48] content life, maybe not thrilling, to a kind of feeling of slow desperation. And just emotionally there's so much in there. I think it's a real talent for an author to be able to communicate that a character

[00:27:07] is going through some emotional change, but the character herself doesn't know what that change is. From her description of her life, we start getting a sense of like what's going on. But she is not... She's still on the journey trying to figure out what's going on.

[00:27:29] I think she progressively becomes more aware, but you're right that at first we come into it and there's a lot of cues like the fact that she's reading Anna Karenina is the first thing she does when she enters this condition is read Anna Karenina.

[00:27:47] We have at least a little bit of an inkling that this is about a woman who feels alienated from herself and her life because of a kind of patriarchal structure that isn't obviously oppressive, but it's suffocating nonetheless. And that's another thing I really liked about it.

[00:28:11] The husband doesn't seem like a bad guy. The son seems like actually a pretty good, happy kid. But the more you hear about her own relation to them or connection to them, you realize

[00:28:23] that they've become like hostile forces in her life, but not in any way that's obvious why. Right. Right. Clearly they're not intending that. And it really is a sort of growing insight and the insight is provided to her because

[00:28:43] she now has every night, she has time completely to herself. So her husband and her son are falling deep sleep and she's not tired at all. So she essentially has like a whole date or the night to herself to do whatever she wants.

[00:29:00] And it's only in having this freedom, this time completely away from anybody requiring anything of her, any duties that she has because her life as a housewife is full of the chores and the responsibilities.

[00:29:16] It's with that freedom that she starts realizing, it sounds corny to say it, but like that she's really been asleep this whole time. Yes. Yes. But even that doesn't fully cohere with some aspects of the story because it says that

[00:29:34] she likes to get all her housewifey chores done before lunch and then she will have the afternoon to herself if she can do that. It's like she has more time now, but there's not a difference in kind. Yeah.

[00:29:52] But this kicked her into, like when she described, so the opening sentence is, this is my 17th straight day without sleep. So she's been going through this for a couple of weeks now. There's some realization that kicks into her because of this, either because of the condition

[00:30:07] or because of the free time. You're right. It might not be that the free time has given her this because she has had free time. But when, for instance, she describes that before when she would try to read during

[00:30:17] her free time, she would have an open book and she would kind of like be reading, but then her mind would just start wandering into all of the other things that she had to do for the rest of the day. And so she wasn't really reading.

[00:30:29] And what she has at night is a full ability to devote herself to purely selfish, selfish might not be the right words, but purely following the interests that she has and she alone has. Yeah, yeah.

[00:30:44] But you're right that she has this ability to focus now and also to like really engage in a kind of self-examination that might actually be something you do more at night than you do during the day when you're still caught up in the routine of everyday life.

[00:31:02] One of the interesting little ironies, though, is she starts out with this routine. Then this thing happens and we have to talk about what we think this is. But then she still afterwards settles into a routine.

[00:31:14] It's just the routine involves a lot more really good, I don't know, I'm jealous of how she describes her ability to read Anna Karenina and really think about it and focus on it. And like that's all she's doing when she's reading it.

[00:31:28] You know, it's like that attention span that she has that and she's it's like she's almost decoding Tolstoy. She has it's it's almost like superpowers. Depending on meth or how you feel when you're on like really good, like some really good upper.

[00:31:43] Yeah, except for with none of the downsides. Right. So she's also seems very physically healthy. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she looks great. You know, she doesn't have the sallow weight loss, the shallow cheeks and the weight loss of a meth head.

[00:31:58] So I can't help like, okay, broadly, I can't help but read this as as a feminist take on the life of a housewife. Like there's more. Obviously, there's going to be more like there's a lot here just about identity and whatever. And even existentialism, disassociation, memory.

[00:32:18] But it is it's hard not to see the part of like, wow, this is this is a quiet desperation of somebody who clearly had intellectual interests, desire to go to graduate school and who kind

[00:32:30] of gave that all up because that's just what she had to do and and lost it and has now found that joy again. And as she has found that joy again, her current life seems less hers.

[00:32:42] Like she's having this sort of distance from her family life, her duties and the way that she deals with it in this super dissociative way is like goes through the motions during the day becomes herself, her true self at night.

[00:32:57] There's a real sad part in there for me where she says, none of my family, like my father, my mother in law or my son, they didn't notice that I wasn't sleeping at all. If anything, they seem to get along with me even more.

[00:33:10] They seem more at peace. Yeah. And that to me was like, well, because now that she's actually fulfilling herself in her own time, they wanted a robot. They wanted they want somebody who doesn't make too much.

[00:33:24] You know, it doesn't kick up a fuss about anything and just had the same. Yeah. I had the same reaction to that. That's very sad. You know, like it was stressing them out at some level.

[00:33:34] They probably couldn't even articulate that there was this yearning that this woman had that was like inchoate and unexpressed. And now that that's being taken care of, like it's like, oh, perfect. Like now you're just this robot is a great way to describe.

[00:33:50] And it's like when our A.I.s take over, you know, our families will be happy. Miss David doesn't doesn't have that quiet sense of longing for a better life. Yeah, exactly. This feeling of being stifled.

[00:34:07] It's interesting, though, like I think it's a feminist take that then or it's that story like the Anna Karenina story. And I guess like the Anna Karenina story, it becomes tragic, but it gets dark towards

[00:34:21] the end of the story where she starts not just realizing I was practically asleep during my whole life, as you say. She starts to not love the husband and to kind of not resent him or just like it's like

[00:34:36] her self actualization and the kind of selfishness that has to come with that results in a kind of meanness towards her family. That's when things take a turn to this really dark conclusion.

[00:34:49] How do you interpret the fact that she has this superpower now to sleep, to not sleep and to be at like kind of peak faculties? Like she's in flow like every night from like 1030 till like dawn or whatever. Until the end where she struggles for the first time.

[00:35:08] She can't concentrate on what she's reading. But before then, yeah, she is in perfect. She has that ability to really take in whatever she's doing in the present. So let's talk about some of the details because I think it matters.

[00:35:22] So as you said before, she says from the get go, this isn't insomnia. Like this isn't what most people would think of as insomnia. And she gives this description of when she was in college and she actually had a bad bout of insomnia.

[00:35:35] And she talks about what that felt like. Her head always being foggy, her body on the verge of sleep, but her mind determined to stay awake. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular wave-like intervals on the subway, in the classroom, at the dinner table.

[00:35:51] My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep, but I couldn't. The wakefulness was always there beside me.

[00:36:04] I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. It's so good. It's so good. The other little sentence that I love from this description is, this is such a perfect description of insomnia. Like when you've just been awake the whole night.

[00:36:20] Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I'd feel that I might be drifting off, but that wasn't sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while my mind was wide awake.

[00:36:34] You're just, you're so close, but then you're not. And it's the same thing when you're awake, then you're not really awake. You're at the outermost edge of awakeness. Like this and the movie Fight Club really get insomnia down very well. And it's miserable.

[00:36:55] At the beginning actually, like of the story, like a description of insomnia. And then she says that all of a sudden one day she like pretty much collapses, goes to her bed and slept for 27 hours straight and nobody could wake her up.

[00:37:08] And then it just didn't come back. And she says, when I finally did awaken, I was my old self again, probably. So there's already like a lot of this has already thrown into question her connection to her, like herself as she conceives it, the self that she experiences.

[00:37:26] Yeah. But whatever she has now given all the description that we've already talked about, like is not that kind of insomnia. And she goes to some length to talk about how this doesn't seem like a thing that could be possible. So she reads some books about sleep.

[00:37:47] She reads about these experiments that the Nazis did. And she knows, seems like as a matter of scientific fact, that people just cannot survive on no sleep for more than a few days without either going crazy or dying. So what's happening to her is a mystery.

[00:38:06] And so, yeah. What do you think? I mean, obviously there's magic, like a lot of surreal things happen in Murakami books. The few novels that I've read, they all have to some degree. But what is this supposed to represent? What is this? Like, what do you think?

[00:38:27] So I, okay. I do have a theory, but it's not great. And the first night, as you mentioned before, she has like a terrible dream. Couldn't try to find the... She has just this terrible feeling of dread.

[00:38:43] It's like one of these dreams where you wake up, but you're not really awake. Right. So she says she just horrible feeling like she's being dragged into a void. And she says, I woke at the climactic moment, came fully awake with a start as if something

[00:38:54] had dragged me back at the last moment from a fatal turning point. Had I remained immersed in the dream for another second, I would have been lost forever. After I woke, my breath came and painful gasp for a time. My arm and leg felt paralyzed.

[00:39:08] Then she thinks she's awake right now. But all of a sudden this old man appears at the foot of her bed. Just then I seem to catch a glimpse of something at the foot of the bed. Something like a vague black shadow.

[00:39:21] I caught my breath, my heart, my lungs, everything inside me seemed to freeze in that instant. I strained to see the black shadow. Then the shadow begins to actually fill out with details.

[00:39:30] And it was a gaunt old man wearing a skin tight, kind of funny, skin tight black shirt. His hair was gray and short, his cheeks sunken. He stood at my feet perfectly still. He said nothing there.

[00:39:42] He had huge eyes and she could see the red network of veins in them. And he had no expression on his face. And then the man has like an object in his hand that she can't make out what it is,

[00:39:52] but it turns into like an old timey ceramic pitcher and he starts pouring water on her feet. And she can't feel the water. She obviously can't move. But she can hear it and she can see it. Yeah, she can see it and she hears it splashing.

[00:40:07] And she starts worrying that her feet are going to melt and rot away, which is such a dream thing to like to think. And then she closed her eyes and tried to scream with every ounce of strength that she had, but the scream never left her body.

[00:40:26] Another dream. It reverberated soundlessly inside tearing through me, shutting down my heart. Everything inside my head turned white for a moment as the scream penetrated my every cell. Something inside me died. Something melted away, leaving only a shuddering vacuum. An explosive flash incinerated everything my existence depended on.

[00:40:46] Yeah, so let's, should we start with the scream? What do you think? Yeah, well, let's start with a sleep paralysis part. Have you had sleep paralysis before? Okay, so this is a really good description. I've had it like tons of times.

[00:40:57] So sleep paralysis is this condition where basically when you go into REM sleep, like when you start dreaming, your body has a little switch that turns off your muscle movement because if not, you would be acting out your dreams.

[00:41:12] And people do have disorders where that switch isn't working and they like are acting out their dreams and it's super dangerous. So your body is like has a safety system. But sometimes the switch doesn't turn back on when you're coming out of sleep.

[00:41:26] And so you're in this like a kind of awake state and you can't move a muscle. And oftentimes this is accompanied by hallucinations where you're trying to yell out in the room, but you'll often see something like or see somebody there in the room.

[00:41:43] And people often talk about sleep paralysis demons because they'll, you know, they'll have like this image of something there that's intruded in their room. Some people... This is the thing that Rodney Asher did a movie about. It's a terrifying, terrifying experience.

[00:41:58] And I used to get it all the time. You don't anymore? Not so often. It happens more if I nap. It happened to my daughter the other day and she was freaked out. It used to happen to me as a kid and I was so freaked out.

[00:42:10] And I remember asking my mom, like, do you know what's happening? And she's like, I don't know what you're talking about. So for years, because the internet didn't exist, like I had no idea what was happening to me. I thought I was just like some freak of nature.

[00:42:22] And one day I'm reading the encyclopedia and I see an entry on sleep paralysis and I'm like, this, this shit right here that happens to me. And my dad goes, oh yeah, it happens to me all the time too. I was like, fuck you dad for communicating.

[00:42:34] That's like Christians. Like you have this horrible, like horrifying thing that is like tormenting you and you don't even tell each other. It really is very specific to Christians. Right? You don't like feel the need to like bother anybody with it. You know?

[00:42:53] Jews would be like, holy fucking shit. We're going to be bitching about it nonstop the first time it happens. Right. We get to hear when your tummy hurts. So, so it is a great description of this terrifying sleep paralysis that happens.

[00:43:07] And, and so the hallucination makes all make sense. Like she's, she's having this you know, you're, you're in that hypnagogic state where you're like halfway between waking and sleep. And so that, that it took that specific form.

[00:43:20] I don't know what to make of, and I don't know what to make of the water. Did you have any, any theories about baptism? Baptism. Yeah. Like this is a rebirth. Yeah. That's a bit, I thought like this was a birthing scene, you know? Yeah.

[00:43:34] But the, the fact that she lets out the scream and it doesn't escape, pulls against a kind of, this is a liberating rebirth, like an awakening. There's definitely, I'll probably talk at some point about certain Buddhist connections in this.

[00:43:50] But it pushes against that just the fact that the scream can't leave her. She has to like, even when she's having her drink of brandy, dusting off the brandy. The Remy Martin. After this happens. The Remy Martin. Yeah. She's like a rapper.

[00:44:08] Though the terror was leaving me, the trembling of my body would not stop. It was in my skin, like circular ripples on the water after an earthquake. I could see the slight quivering. The scream had done it.

[00:44:20] The scream that had never found a voice was still locked up in my body, making it tremble. That's I think like, that's a kind of a key phrase. The scream that never found a voice, I think is like her life, you know?

[00:44:36] As she's, as this housewife, like this is just a desperate scream that nobody's hearing. Both times that this happens, the real insomnia and then whatever this is, nobody notices. Yeah. She is like alone.

[00:44:51] She is isolated from the people who are supposed to like, care about her and know when something's wrong, you know? That's another really sad part of this. Yeah. Yep. But so you think, so if that sleep paralysis still, how does that explain the fact that now

[00:45:08] she's super awesome? You're gonna hate what I'm going to say because I kind of hate it because I don't think that it matters so much, but I feel like she might be asleep this whole time.

[00:45:22] And that last scene, which is it okay, you think if I describe the last scene? Sure. Yeah. So in the very last scene, there's a lot of stuff that she does in between that we'll talk about, but in the very last scene, she's in her car.

[00:45:35] She's out by what is it, the harbor? Yeah. And late at night at a place that is dangerous and two shadowy figures start shaking her car. And it ends with that, like she's, her fear that they're going to turn the car over.

[00:45:51] I feel like that might be her son and husband trying to wake her up. Yeah. I feel like she's experienced all this liberation, unfortunately in this dream state, which does sound reductive and it sounds like you and I have railed against the whole, it's all a

[00:46:09] dream thing before, but in this case, I think it might work. And besides the important part really is, is the details of what's going on in her mind. During the dream. Yeah. I like that.

[00:46:22] I definitely think there's a lot that supports that the two men in the car are her husband and son. This is the same night that she looked at them and realized like she kind of despised them both. Oh, that's so sad too.

[00:46:40] There's a scene earlier on where she kind of giving a sense of her life and she says that my two men quote men always wave to me on the way out their hands move in exactly the same way. It's almost uncanny.

[00:46:55] So she already sees them as alien figures. They're men. They're not threatening in this, in any sense of like violence, but there's something about their existence that is oppressing her. And she always describes them as very much the same, but in their physical mannerisms,

[00:47:15] but then also in their like ability to sleep and their kind of blissful imbecilic, like contentment with life. It's really not flattering. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by NordVPN. You know, VPNs can do a lot of things for me.

[00:47:37] It obviously revolves around movies and TV shows. You know how streamers are always pulling movies and TV shows from their services. Just one day it's there. The next day it's gone. You can't even rent it. You can't buy it.

[00:47:49] There's movies and TV shows that I have no access to if I live in the United States, unless I have a VPN like Nord. NordVPN allows you to access content from over 60 different countries by changing your location with one click. And this works both ways.

[00:48:09] You can get stuff in, I don't know, Belgium or in Sweden if you're in the United States, but also when you're traveling, you have access to your own services. As an example, I was just in Mexico City with my family, spring break, which was also

[00:48:24] the first week of the NCAA tournament. And you know, going out with the family, having tequila, having all that delicious food. It's all great, but I wanted to watch some tournament games too.

[00:48:35] And I have Hulu Live, but I couldn't access it because they don't do Hulu in Mexico. And I had let my NordVPN subscription lapse, something I won't do again. So I didn't get to watch any tournament games. I just had to spend all that time with my family.

[00:48:52] NordVPN is also fast. It has amazing speed. The fastest VPN out there. This is confirmed by the speed tests. You can access it on six different devices. It's easy to use. You can connect with one click or even enable auto-connect for zero-click protection. Good encryption.

[00:49:11] I'm not 100% sure what encryption is, but I think it's good. Our listeners can go to nordvpn.com slash VBW for an exclusive NordVPN deal. Once again, go to www.nordvpn.com slash VBW. This is risk-free with Nord's 30-day money back guarantee. Give it a shot.

[00:49:37] You have nothing to lose. Thanks to NordVPN for sponsoring this episode. So yeah, that's them waking her up. Yeah. Oh, and you know what else is good for your theory? The fact that in the beginning of it, she woke from the dream she thought,

[00:49:57] but it was still the dream. That's when the guy puts... So we've already established that you can wake up, think you're awake. That's right. I like it as a frame, like as an interpretation.

[00:50:08] Like you said, what matters is what happens then in the dream, if that's how you interpret it. Yeah. Which brings me to this other thing that I am... Like I read this literally like right before we started recording.

[00:50:20] I was just doing a bit of Googling on to see what people said about this. And there's something that somebody wrote that kind of convinced me that this other thing is going on, that is kind of creepy.

[00:50:35] You know, she gives this recollection of being in college and messing around with a guy, her boyfriend at the time in her car or in a car. And he tries to go, he tries to like have sex with her and she says no.

[00:50:52] And then she sort of dismisses it. So what this person's theory was, was that she was actually abused. She was raped that night. It does fit with... Like when she talks about sex with her husband, you know, it doesn't feel,

[00:51:10] it doesn't seem like this is like something that she's enjoying. Like at one point, she's like, why should I even have sex with him? It feels like in the scream, that despair, it feels like what she's doing has

[00:51:20] been this whole time suppressing or repressing the trauma that she had from this. And she doesn't even realize. And then a lot of people talk about, you know, this is such a... There's so much dissociation as a theme of this story

[00:51:34] that it does seem like she has divided her world into two as a way to cope. But here's what really fucked with me was that, remember when she first goes to the harbor? So one of the things that she does is she gets in her little beater Civic

[00:51:49] and she has driven to the harbor. And one night, the cop knocks on her window and says, hey, be careful. There was a couple here a few months ago where some guys came and like they murdered the guy and they raped the woman.

[00:52:05] She goes back to that harbor at the end, dressed as a man. As if she wants to be the one that's killed, not the one that's raped. Yeah. So it's a suicide. Yeah. I had that thought. Yeah. Cause there's like, at first I was like,

[00:52:26] why would she dress up like a man to go to that harbor? And then somebody pointed out that earlier story, it's the man who gets killed and the woman who gets raped. Like if she's going to be, maybe it's not a suicide,

[00:52:37] but it's more like if she's going to be in danger, she doesn't want that danger to be a rape. Like that would be too much. Yeah. And she has, there is a manic side of how she is during the sleepless period. Yeah. Right.

[00:52:51] That's right. I hadn't thought of it that way. Totally. Yeah. So yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it's definitely possible that she's describing when she was sexually assaulted. It's possible that that's connected to the early insomnia. Yeah. Again, it's something that nobody noticed.

[00:53:10] Nobody seemed to like even care that she was probably acting in ways that are totally not like her. It doesn't seem like there's been any kind of sea change in terms of what's making this happen. If that's true, and I think something like it probably is,

[00:53:28] she's always had this scream that's locked up inside her that can't find a voice. And so- It doesn't have time. It's almost as if like going through the motions of life, what she calls these little tendencies that these going through life on automatic

[00:53:44] has in some ways stopped her from reflecting on what's happened to her in the past. And she stopped reading. She has kind of turned off that part of her mind that would even lead to that self-discovery or that insight or self-knowledge. Yeah.

[00:53:58] And now that she's not sleeping and she gets this time, she reads Anna Karenina three times and she goes to Dostoevsky, which by the way, when she's describing the ugliness of her husband's face, that's just straight out of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, like their ability to describe ugliness.

[00:54:15] It's Murakami doing his best Russian depressed. I love what he says about Tolstoy. All the time I had been washing the dishes, my only thoughts had been of Vronsky and how an author like Tolstoy managed to control his characters so skillfully. He described them with such wonderful precision,

[00:54:33] but that very precision somehow denied them a kind of salvation. That's so good. That's so good. And Murakami is not describing her with a precision as if to let her find salvation. She also is denied salvation and- I think, sorry, I was going with the like,

[00:54:54] I think Murakami wants this character to achieve salvation. Oh, you think? The other people are described, we don't get that much precision about her. That's true. We don't even know her name. Yeah. Right? Do we not? No. I don't think so. Nope.

[00:55:08] I don't think we know anybody's name. All we know, she looks at herself in the mirror a couple of times, but doesn't even really describe her appearance other than whether she likes it or not. Oh yeah, that's way better.

[00:55:19] Yeah. I mean, I do think there are certain things that he captures though, with a lot of precision, but maybe like the haziness of what's going on and what's a dream and what's real. Like that's another thing that is a constant theme in her life.

[00:55:35] Is she asleep? Is she awake? Is she dreaming? Is she not like, she never fully knows except in her mind anyway, during this, especially like the first part of the period where she has this insomnia, there's all these descriptions that sound very much like a kind of awakening.

[00:55:56] You know, just her ability to concentrate, her ability to be in the present. So like here's us before the insomnia, she's talking about her life and she says, each day pretty much a repetition of the one before I used to keep a diary,

[00:56:10] but if I forgot for two or three days, I'd look, I'd lose track of what had happened on which day the demarcation, there was a lack of demarcation between the days. And she says, I was amazed at this, right?

[00:56:22] Like I was amazed at the fact that my footprints were being blown away before I even had a chance to turn and look at them. It's all just this amorphous blur. But when she's in that kind of peak of this, whatever insomniac condition that she has,

[00:56:39] she says, now at least I was expanding my life and it was wonderful. My hands weren't empty anymore. Here I was alive and I could feel it. It was real. I wasn't being consumed any longer.

[00:56:51] If sleep is nothing more than a periodic repairing of the parts of me that are being worn away, I don't want it anymore. I don't need it anymore. My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind belongs to me.

[00:57:04] There was this feeling, there was a part of me in existence that was not being consumed and that was what gave me this intensely real feeling of being alive. And she sees this with clarity, but it just, it doesn't last.

[00:57:19] No, and if this is a dream and the insight that she's having is within this dream, like she's lived like a month or half a month in this dream and it's coming to these realizations. She might not have them upon awakening. She might lose it all.

[00:57:36] I mean, there's so much there. There's so much there about just identity and memories and like, ah. It's right after this that she starts looking at her dumb ass, like can't drink husband and like the kind of self-satisfied ability to sleep,

[00:57:52] which I also, like I very much related to that kind of resentment. My wife is a really good sleeper and like. Absolutely. Like when they start snoring, like when you're with somebody and they start snoring

[00:58:03] like three minutes after they put their head on the pillow, I'm like, fuck you. Fuck you. By the way, and also one of the things that she says about her husband was that he had failed to be her protector.

[00:58:14] And from that point on, she couldn't look at his face when he sleeps. And it's centers around this time when they had an argument about what their name to name their son. And her mother-in-law was saying, you should name it this.

[00:58:27] And the husband, he just didn't man up. He didn't actually take her side. And so from that point on, she was like, well, like this guy can't protect me. He's not doing what I thought.

[00:58:37] And that made sense to me with the whole like abuse thing where like he. She, she's not being protected in much more. She has no allies. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the Tolstoy like precision descriptions, because I know people who this is true of.

[00:58:57] It's like the biggest betrayal is when your fiance or your like spouse, partner, whatever, doesn't support you in a conflict, like in a very important conflict with their family. That's like the most important thing.

[00:59:13] If you're listening to this and you're with somebody right now, like step up and support them during this time, because if you don't, this is what this is the shit that's going to happen. The resentment.

[00:59:24] I wanted to point to the anecdote, which is at the very end where she's, she is all she's already driven to the harbor dressed as a man. She says, half consciously, I let my eyes wander through the surrounding darkness.

[00:59:38] When all of a sudden I remember a drive I took with my boyfriend the year I was a college freshman. We parked and got into some heavy petting. He couldn't stop, he said, and he begged me to let him put it in.

[00:59:46] But I refused hands on the steering wheel listening to the music. I tried to bring back the scene, but I can't recall his face. It seems to have happened such an incredibly long time ago.

[00:59:55] And so sort of as a matter of factly that image comes back to her, but it seems as if she's repressed the what might be the key part. What followed. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. And then she says- It's definitely out there. Yeah.

[01:00:10] But then she says, it feels so strange as if the me who used to go to sleep every night is not the real me and the memories from back then are not really mine. This is how people change, but nobody realizes it. Nobody notices.

[01:00:20] Only I know what happens. I could try to tell them, but they wouldn't understand. They wouldn't believe me or if they did believe me, they would have absolutely no idea what I'm feeling. They would only see me as a threat to their inductive worldview.

[01:00:32] I am changing though, really changing. How do you read that? It's not, although maybe I would like it to be, it's not something that's attacking scientism. But she does say something. She does say something earlier about the only way people know stuff is through their induction.

[01:00:53] There are other ways of knowing, I think is maybe what she's gesturing at here, which again has a Buddhist- Oh yeah. Here, right? So here it says, it's only three in the morning, but the number of cars on the road is by no means small.

[01:01:09] Huge semis roll past shaking the ground as they head east. Those guys don't sleep at night. They sleep in the daytime and work at night for greater efficiency. What a waste. I could work day and night. I don't have to sleep.

[01:01:19] This is biologically unnatural, I suppose, but who really knows what is natural? They just infer it inductively. I'm beyond that. A priori, an evolutionary leap. A woman who never sleeps, an expansion of consciousness. I have to smile. A priori, an evolutionary leap. That's great. I love that.

[01:01:40] It's like, oh fuck, I'm using philosopher. What's going on? This kind of waffles between some kind of awakening and liberation and also still being in prison and being maybe psychotic. It's like it could be either of these things.

[01:02:01] When she's reading about what sleep is, she says all the stuff about sleep that I read seemed like bullshit except for one book. The author maintained that human beings by their very nature are incapable of escaping

[01:02:16] from certain fixed idiosyncratic tendencies, both in their thought processes and in their physical movements. People unconsciously fashion their own action and thought tendencies which under normal circumstances never disappear. In other words, people live in a prison cell of their own tendencies.

[01:02:33] What modulates these tendencies and keeps them in check so that the organism doesn't wear down as the heel of a shoe does is nothing other than sleep. Sleeping is an act that has been programmed with karmic inevitability into the human system and no one can diverge from it.

[01:02:48] If a person were to diverge from it, the person's very ground of being would be threatened. I think this is getting at the marrow of this story here. It's like to not sleep is to actually threaten her anything about how she understands her identity.

[01:03:08] It is to obliterate her identity because all those tendencies, those habits that make one day bleed into another are now just going to be thrown and gone and shattered. And then what is left? What are you? Yeah. What are you? Yeah. Who are you when that's gone?

[01:03:27] Sleep is there to protect your ability to continue performing those behaviors and she is rejecting the sleep. Because it keeps you in the prison. It keeps you in the prison. And throughout the story, she describes that during the day she's found this way to just

[01:03:43] super efficiently do all the tasks that she needs to do. And that way she has this time all to herself later at night. But it's like she realizes that that can't be maintained. That that's something's going to give eventually. But not doing that also can't be maintained.

[01:04:04] That's the tragedy. With her realization of the prison that she's in, like what? Or dead. I think that's where you get to the end because she talks about death and what that is. And I thought I was worried about you. It's good call.

[01:04:20] I was worried about me too. I'd had this thought before. Maybe somebody had given it to me. She starts talking about, you know, she can't sleep. She's not tired. But when she would close her eyes, she would be just experiencing this complete darkness

[01:04:38] that wasn't sleep like at all. It was what she called a wakeful darkness. And she realized that there's a possibility that death might be like this wakeful darkness, this being consciously in a complete void, which would be terrible.

[01:04:54] It's a horrible, horrible thought that for eternity you're just like sort of awake in a darkness. And she says, but nobody knows. How would anybody know what happens after you die? And that, yeah, I hadn't thought about it until now though, that wakeful darkness is

[01:05:13] kind of the life of no reflection that she might be leading. That would be to lapse back into that wakeful darkness. Or it's the life with no tendencies. It's the self-free life. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you by Aura Frames.

[01:05:32] Aura Frames are digital frames that allow you to upload pictures and videos together and display them on a high resolution display. It's very easy to do. You can upload an unlimited number of photos and videos from anywhere you are in the world

[01:05:47] using the free Aura app and Wi-Fi. There's never any fees for storage. You can even preload the frame with personalized messages and pictures if you're going to give it as a gift. And these are quality products. They've been named by Wirecutter as the number one digital picture frame.

[01:06:03] They've also been listed by The Strategist, by Wired Magazine, recommended by Fast Company. You still might be wondering why Very Bad Wizards is doing an ad for digital picture frames. And here's where I want to tell you a genuinely true story and the reason that we selected

[01:06:17] Aura Frames as a sponsor. I have an infant daughter and my parents live very far away. And one of the gifts that we gave them this Christmas was a digital picture frame. And it's been such a cool gift for my father especially because basically every day at

[01:06:34] the end of the day, we can upload with a click of a button the photos that we've taken of our daughter. And every day he goes to this little spot where he takes a nap and he turns on his digital

[01:06:45] photo frame and he looks forward to seeing the new pictures of his granddaughter. And multiple times he's told us how much that means to him. It's different than just FaceTiming or Zooming with a relative. It's something that provides a connection for people who are far away.

[01:07:02] In fact, if you're looking for a gift, if you've been procrastinating like I have for a gift for Mother's Day, I think this is a great gift. You know if you're the kind of person who would use this or if you know the kind of person

[01:07:14] who would use it. But in my situation, it was actually like the perfect gift. Right now Aura has a great deal for Mother's Day. Listeners of Very Bad Wizards can save on this perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com.

[01:07:27] That's A-U-R-A frames dot com and use code VBW to get up to $30 off plus free shipping on their best selling frames. The deal ends on May 14th so don't wait. Once again that's A-U-R-A frames dot com and use code VBW at checkout for $30 off.

[01:07:45] Our thanks to Aura Frames for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. You said something about psychotic that made me think, yeah, like that's a possibility too. I feel like Murakami very clearly saying the rules of this world are that people need sleep. Right?

[01:08:02] That's just like he's, this isn't a magical world in which she has magical powers. So if that's the case, then you have a few possibilities. One, it's a dream like the whole time, which I think is quite possibly the case. Two, she's just actually going crazy.

[01:08:21] Like she, you know, as she says, studies have shown that you descend into madness after a few days with no sleep. Like maybe she is actually descending into madness. Do you think we're supposed to like settle on some kind of interpretation that is consistent

[01:08:38] with how we understand reality? I'm not sure. Like it could be a dream. It could be she's going crazy, but it could also be like that she actually just gained the power to not sleep. I don't know.

[01:08:51] Yeah, it could be like, I don't think we're supposed to figure out like that, you know, as we've said many times, this isn't Scooby-Doo. And so, so like the truths here that are being communicated are these deep emotional truth and it matters.

[01:09:07] That's why I was reluctant to even say the dream thing. Because it's like, well, what does that even add? Like, yeah. Like if you treat this like a mystery, the clues in there might lead you to the, it was all a dream. Which is fine.

[01:09:18] I actually like that. Yeah, I do too actually. It doesn't mean it doesn't like none of the, all of this is made up. So if the back of that is also made up, like it doesn't. Right.

[01:09:29] Where I was going though with the rules that Murakami set up, I feel like him going to great lengths to say that this isn't natural is there for a reason, I think. And what that reason is, who knows? But I think it's the tragedy.

[01:09:45] It's like liberation means death essentially. You know, like it's like to actually be liberated from this life as you live it is to die. So going back to this, the passages you read about death. So she says, the best guess is still a guess.

[01:10:05] Maybe death is that passage, right? Death can be anything at all. An intense terror overwhelmed me at the thought. A stiffening chill ran down my spine. My eyes were still shut tight. I had lost the power to open them. This is in like, in her wakefulness period.

[01:10:20] I stared at the thick darkness that's depleted in front of me, a darkness as deep and hopeless as the universe itself. I was all alone. My mind was in deep concentration and expanding. If I had wanted to, I could have seen into the uttermost depths of the universe.

[01:10:36] But I decided not to look. It was too soon for that. That sounds to me like, you know, I've read a lot about these people who have these kind of bad, deep meditation experiences where they feel themselves being like coming apart.

[01:10:52] But instead of that kind of ease that you can often feel with that, you feel a kind of terror and disintegration. And that's what this sounds like. And it's like, it's like if she's at the edge right now of death and she could go into

[01:11:08] it, but at least at this point she doesn't. Yeah. But, but that's where this is heading. You know, that's what I think the story is like heading there. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, and you know, maybe where it settles is it's back to the husband that

[01:11:26] doesn't drink and sleeps perfectly or, or death. Yeah. And by the way, at the end there, she says, if death was like this, if to die meant being eternally awake and staring into darkness, what should I do? At last I managed to open my eyes.

[01:11:41] I gulped down the brandy that was left in my glass. The solution to the existential terror is to take a drink. Just to calm yourself, like to settle yourself. You know, that's what she had.

[01:11:54] I was so upset at the first night after the dream where she's still like physically shaking and she decides not to have another glass of brandy, even though she wants it. Cause she wants to be ready for the day. And I was like, no, have the candy lakes.

[01:12:10] That's what you need. You're like an old timey doctor. Yeah. And also like fuck tomorrow. Who cares? Give it a shake. Pretend you're sick. Whatever. Like she did to get out of sex with her husband.

[01:12:23] So one of the things that I wanted to bring up was that the metaphor of the car engine. That she makes, she talks about the engine needing to be repaired and it needs to rest.

[01:12:35] And like, it's very much like the discussion of sleep and how your body needs to repair. And so she's talking about her Civic that has all these miles on it. And that when you turn the engine off, it cools down and it rests like,

[01:12:49] or else it would just not work if it wasn't able to take those breaks. And at the very end, the car has just won't start. Exactly. It doesn't wake up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like that's a, where this is headed, I think.

[01:13:10] And like maybe she dies at the end or at least in a kind of terror. I feel like it's ego death because if she's had these insights in an extended dream and she wakes up, she's going to lose them.

[01:13:22] She's going to go right back to her robot life with no anacranina and brandy. And no demarcation between the days. And yeah. Depressing. Like, I don't know if the existential stories find us or if we find them, but it is.

[01:13:40] I do kind of feel like, I remember having this thought, all stories and movies are essentially existentialist and maybe stories and short stories and movies, especially because you're not getting this long description of a person.

[01:13:57] You're not with them for, you have to have, it has to revolve around choices that are like determining who you're going to be or questioning what you are or something like that. So that's why Wakanda Forever is just so moving.

[01:14:15] The existential, you can write an essay, the existential nature of the Marvel universe, phase four. I'm talking about cinema. There's a lot of interesting stuff also. Like the first time she looks at her husband, like she makes a joke about the fact that

[01:14:35] he's not good looking, but then also just, she doesn't know what he looks like. She couldn't draw him. Like he's already hazy. She already has this very hazy, like that's the, I guess the contrast. This is pre new sleepiness phase, sleepless phase.

[01:14:54] She is already just living in this hazy life where nothing is that distinct. She's like, he has no distinguishing features really. Same with her son and same with just her connection to herself. She doesn't know why she's doing things, but the car is a great, because it's, but

[01:15:11] it's like this beat up car with the engine that sometimes doesn't start, but she says, but I don't care. It's mine. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, she mentions that she was a good student and wrote a thesis on Catherine Mansfield

[01:15:31] and her thesis advisor advised, told her to go to grad school. I didn't, I didn't know who Catherine Mansfield was. She was an author from New Zealand, a woman who it sounds like a lot of like she wrote

[01:15:43] a lot of dark, dark shit, but was, was very well respected author. But she, she also went through multiple relationships with men, but would have relationships with women. It's pretty clear that she was lesbian, but, but nonetheless got like got in marriages with men.

[01:16:05] And, and I, once I saw that, I couldn't help but think that like, Hey, maybe this woman is like, what's going on is some repressed sexuality, but there's really nothing else in there. There's nothing else.

[01:16:17] One thing that's funny about Murakami, like this is true of all the other stuff I've read is that it's, it's like, it's a Western novel. All his references are Western. I read that he's been like criticized by Japanese critics for not being Japanese enough.

[01:16:33] But it's like weird the way he goes at, aside from his description of like, sometimes like dinners that are being cooked in a, you really would barely know that it's Japan for a lot of them.

[01:16:46] He's very obsessed with like all the American references, like, you know, like a lot of his, the novels that I've read are very much in the kind of Raymond Chandler heart and with the same kind of references to Western noir.

[01:16:59] And this is that too, like it's Mozart and Haydn are the references and Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky and, you know. Yeah. I get the, I got the feeling that he wants, he wants this to be a universal story, you know? He doesn't want to limit it.

[01:17:18] Like, I don't know, I've read one book of his, but so that the rest of the world won't think you're just a Japanese author. Yeah. It's just that like, then you could still put some Japanese stuff in it. You're saying he's self-hating.

[01:17:31] Or he's disguising what I think is an exploration of the self that is very influenced by Eastern understandings of the self because that's another thing. I think there's so much in here, like where's the description of her looking at herself in the mirror? Yeah.

[01:17:50] By the way, that description, have you ever stared at yourself in the mirror so long that you have dissociative thoughts? Yes. They haven't been the most vivid distort, but yeah, it's like, wait, what? Yeah. That's me? It's a good way to like induce dissociation.

[01:18:06] Just keep looking at yourself in the mirror. That phrase, ground of being is a big part of Buddhist and especially the kind of Buddhism that Sam and that school Dzogchen, which involves this kind of ground of being and all like

[01:18:27] the contents of consciousness are supported by and kind of inseparable from the ground. Where's that passage of being in the mirror? Whenever I felt like that, I would look at my face in the bathroom mirror. Just look at it for 15 minutes at a time.

[01:18:43] My mind, a total blank. I'd stare at my face purely as a physical object and gradually it would disconnect from the rest of me becoming just something that happened to exist at the same time as myself and a realization would come to me.

[01:18:55] This is happening here and now. It's got nothing to do with footprints. Reality and I exist simultaneously at this present moment. That's the most important thing. That's actually like the here and now, another big term in the Dzogchen tradition.

[01:19:08] The here and now, it's like the facade, the persona, the stable identity. You're beneath it and you're beneath it in the now. You're beneath it in the way that you always are and always have to be.

[01:19:21] That was actually the passage I was searching for before of how she's just in the present. But it just can't sustain. On that, when I read some of the later passages where she's talking about this, it reminded

[01:19:36] me of this paper that I read about the phenomenology of losing your sense of self. It's a fairly neutral depiction of this. Interviews a lot of people. Some of them had really good experiences and feeling of great ease and liberation and

[01:19:54] connectedness with others but some of them didn't. Here's a quote from somebody just describing the experience. It basically felt like whatever personality I thought I had before just disintegrated. It wasn't an expansive disintegration into unity or bliss or anything like that. It was a disintegration into dust.

[01:20:15] I didn't believe in all the things that people tell themselves that something is worth it or just be you. All these positive psychological frameworks that people used to get through life just seemed unconvincing. I came to this conclusion during that time period that personality is just a structure

[01:20:29] without any real substance to it. I don't know if that really solved anything for me or resolved anything for me but I was just convinced that there wasn't any point in working on this structure. That's, I think, a nice description of where she is.

[01:20:44] The structure is not working for her. The persona, the habits, the tendencies are not working for her but that doesn't mean that there's a good alternative. Right. It's weird though because the time that she has to herself, especially at the beginning

[01:20:59] of this story where she's rediscovering her passion for reading this stuff. She opens the book and she sees chocolate flakes from when last she read this and she realized that she had lost this part of herself and she's reclaiming it.

[01:21:13] It does seem like she's found this time in which she can be her authentic self and this has made life worth living. She'll continue going through the motions of being a surface dweller and being the good

[01:21:30] wife and she's found a way though to do it almost without consciously experiencing it and saving all of that for night time when she can drink her brandy and eat her chocolate. She even describes having a voracious appetite during those moments and it does seem good that she...

[01:21:49] It seems like there is the finding of an identity there but then it kind of turns darker and I don't know if Murakami is saying, yeah, this is the price. She is saying almost explicitly, the price that I pay might have to be something like

[01:22:07] death or ego death or dissolution but it was worth it to have these moments where I was truly me. Yeah, she even says that. This is going to come back to haunt me. There's no way.

[01:22:17] I'm sure this is taking a toll on my body and maybe my psyche but I don't care. At least it's being alive for a little bit and awake for a little bit and I'll take whatever comes of it. If it's bad, I don't know. Maybe it's bad.

[01:22:35] She's like, let the hypothesis run wherever it wants. Right now she's in the flow of living and actualizing in some sense and so I couldn't really pinpoint the moment where it turns but it definitely takes a turn and that's

[01:22:53] when she looks at her husband and son with contempt and also where she stops being able to concentrate for the first time on what she's reading and then she dresses up like a boy. You could definitely paint this in terms of trauma.

[01:23:07] She's warded it off but if you're really going to actualize, if you're really going to discover yourself, you actually have to face something that's so dark that she can't really face it. Right.

[01:23:19] By the way, there was something that was so sad to me about when she's looking at her son's sleeping face and she realizes that something about his face annoyed me and when she looked again, she says, then it hit me.

[01:23:33] What bothered me about my son's sleeping face was that it looked exactly like my husband's and exactly like my mother-in-law's stubborn self-satisfied. It was in their blood. There, I couldn't, first of all, sad that you would feel that way about your son and

[01:23:46] she's sad about it but also like it really is like he's just going to become one of the forces that's keeping me down. Like he's just like that, you know? Like patriarchy or whatever it is.

[01:23:59] Like he's, I'm just raising somebody to be another man like my husband is a man. Yeah, he's going to stop me from drinking and having chocolate. Yeah. And he's going to ask for like afternoon sex.

[01:24:11] And that's why the reading of the people rocking her car at the end being her son and husband seems very compelling. And I didn't think of this but the idea of them trying to wake her is, it totally makes sense in light of that.

[01:24:29] Did you see somebody on Reddit had a theory that this was just like an allegory for drug addiction? I mean, it could be. It sounds like doing like really high quality, like speed coke, you know, like at those kind

[01:24:43] of peak moments where you just feel like you can do anything. And sacrifice, knowing that you're sacrificing your long-term health. Yeah. But I don't, it's deeper. It feels deeper than that. That's what's such a good story because it can be all these things at the same time. Yep.

[01:24:59] I mean, I'm sticking to my lesbian story. She just needs to like scissor some 26 year old graduate student and like it'll all be fine. Yes. She'll love her son again. Yes, that's what I'm saying. The description of the ugliness of the man, you know. Oh yeah.

[01:25:27] You know, it's like she thought she was in a good relationship and we see her description change. She thought her life was good. She just hasn't had the opportunity to really reflect on it. Did she ever think her life was good though?

[01:25:40] I think she thought it was fine. She thought it was fine. Like I think she had convinced herself like when she says, and my friends all tell me like what a good husband I have.

[01:25:48] Like you do get the sense that she has landed the life that is supposed to be a good life. Landed the life that is supposed to be like the pinnacle of society for wherever she is, right?

[01:26:05] Where she has a husband with a good job, you know, if anything, the burden is that his business has grown. And so how could she complain about that? Like he's sweet, you know, they used to make love in the afternoons.

[01:26:19] Like and then you start seeing the cracks where she's like, you know, we were happier then I guess. But here what she's having is just a real, it's almost like a strangely individualistic take like where she's having this real realization that she has suppressed all her own interests

[01:26:37] and desires and identity for the sake of having this life. And the imagery of the father and the son shaking her to come back to being that person is pretty strong. That's the Tolstoy-like precision too is the whole description of the dentist.

[01:26:54] You know, you have this office and that all of a sudden he's getting busier and busier. He can give less time with her, less kind of real connection with her, but she can't complain. Like that's a line actually, that's a refrain. You can't complain because it's good.

[01:27:08] But the whole reason it's good is because they went into massive debt to fund the dental office and all this stuff is for him to feel comfortable and settled. And she is just like support for that. And it just creeps.

[01:27:23] It like just gradually becomes something that swallows up her life, but she can't complain. That's the silent scream. Yep. She didn't even know that scream was in her until she tried to let it out and it wouldn't come out. Yeah. Sucks to be a woman.

[01:27:46] Sorry, Eliza and Lola and Bella. All right. Well, this was fun. I guarantee we'll go back to Murakami. It was a great story. I feel like we didn't do a good job convincing people to read it before they listened to it. But do. Yeah, too late. All right.

[01:28:07] Well, we will return to the Murakami, the MCU. The Murakami. The Murakami. Murakanda forever. That's good. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizard.